The Harvard-Smithsonian Center recently held a debate with the subject being Pluto’s status as a dwarf planet.
The debate included a vote that asked it Pluto was a planet according to the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) definition. IAU’s definition of a planet is that it must orbit the sun, be round or close enough to it and that it must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, reports The Washington Post.
The audience that attended the debate were asked to vote on if Pluto is a planet. The voice vote went unrecorded, but voters claimed that the space rock is a planet. This doesn’t actually change Pluto’s status as a dwarf planet, but the debate did bring up some good points in favor of it being a planet, The Washington Post notes.
Pluto was first discovered an categorized as a planet back in 1930. It didn’t lose it’s planet status until 2006, when the IAU concluded that there were many other small objects orbiting the sun that were just like it. This is what caused it to be labeled as a dwarf planet, reports
